After releasing notorious flop/secret success Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, director John Boorman turned to an attempt at producing a Lord of the…
Under the guise of complacent nothingness, the characters of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers manage to paradoxically enact and participate in sundry relationships, death drives,…
When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a…
Released in March of 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the great debut feature films, a fully-formed work that shows a young(ish) director…
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, summer of 1973. A kid yells from the fire escape outside a brownstone window to his friends on the street below. A…
Permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1969, Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnes: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’eclairage (Given : 1.…
Jacques Rivette works with actors like a child plays with dolls. His films are so lengthy because he often rewrites as his actors play…
There are certain iconic questions in cinema history that have endured long after the credits roll. Who shot first, Han or Greedo? Did the…
Otto Preminger’s career is frequently separated into two distinct halves — the early, studio-contracted work and his later films as a self-produced independent, tackling…
A whopping 13 features deep into their cinematic partnership, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were reaching a new apex of open acrimony in their…
Of all the different horror sub-genres, the zombie flick is perhaps the one with the most innate spectacle. With a few obvious exceptions —…
In his 1978 book Orientalism, historian and cultural critic Edward Said writes: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is…
When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview.…
Imagine my surprise when a cursory online search revealed that virtually no critic of note has written a modern reassessment of the 1986 serial-killer-road-movie…
“You say you’re under a curse – well so what? So’s the whole damn world.” In a darkened cave, miles away from Ashitaka’s home,…
To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic…
It took legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty 19 years after his barnstorming 1973 debut film, Touki Bouki, to deliver his sophomore film. Hyenas,…
After three title cards – “DOG STAR MAN,” “BY BRAKHAGE,” “PRELUDE” – written in an esoteric font, we spend nearly a full minute with…